Fowllyd

To which I might add - like Kojak in a roll-neck jumper. I knew someone who, when looking for a bar in Moscow one time, got the stress wrong on the Russian word for a bar where one stands up to drink; the word she thus used certainly denotes something that stands up, but not a bar. It took her a while to work out why she got the responses she did.

As with all else among their fans, it's all relative (with apologies to Rallyboy for pinching his excellent line ).

Saw that article earlier - great stuff. I remember the first time I went to London with my wife and her daughters (about four years ago) - I was able to point out York Road, the disused Piccadilly Line station between King's Cross and Caledonian Road, as the train conveniently slowed down as we went through. There's always an eerie feeling about those old stations, all the more so when the train lights show up the old platforms.

You can't 'take back' the word nationalist, as it hasn't been misused in the first place. My point was simply that nationalism and patriotism are different things.

From that article: "The only positive period was when we were under Steve Cotterill." Christ, if that was a positive period...

It seems to me that you have the wrong word right from the off - if it's a national day of celebration you're after, then the word is surely patriotism and not nationalism. Patriotism is love of and pride in one's country (native or adopted) whereas nationalism would normally describe a movement to liberate one's country from (for example) an occupier or puppet government subservient to another country. Nationalism tends to contain within itself the risk of becoming hard-line, as many nationalist movements have done over the years. Patriotism does not seek to denigrate those of different nationality; nationalism all too often does. I'd regard patriotism as inclusive and nationalism as exclusive.

Which Football League club (then in the Premier League) hit the headlines when their manager was caught visiting a Thai "massage parlour"? For which club was Sam Sodje playing when he deliberately got himself sent off in order to earn £70,000? Which club has as its most famous supporter a foul-smelling, tattooed w*anker with a bell? (OK, maybe not that one ).

Not sure about him, but I'd heard Nil Desperandum may be available at the right price.

Hell yeah. I'm off to find my torn striped T-shirt right now.

A weasel you might well be, sir, but I can only applaud your knowledge and use of an Alex Harvey song.

Yes, Molly Bloom's monologue was very much in my mind when I wrote that final paragraph! I'll check out Mark Forsyth's books; many thanks for the recommendation. I wouldn't disagree - and I do realise that your previous post wasn't an attempt to impose values of rightness and wrongness. One could, in fact, make a strong case that the syntactic rules of any language are in essence convention rather than anything else. If followed, they will produce comprehensible sentences. But nobody actually makes these rules (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we all do); they are merely observed and documented. There have, of course, been attempts to create rules for the English language (mostly stemming from the work of a few individuals a couple of hundred years ago) - examples such as not splitting infinitives and not ending a sentence with a preposition come to mind. These came about as a result of an attempt to impose Latin syntax on English, something which, given the very different nature of the two languages, couldn't possibly work. And yet they came to be regarded as valid rules of English for many years, and to some they still are.

One of the great political figures of the twentieth century. RIP.

By and large, I'd agree with the first of these statements (or should that be the former? According to some it should) more than I would with the second (or last, or latter). What many people get confused about is what grammar actually is in the first place. Grammar, to a linguist, is something which enables you to create any possible sentence in the language it relates to. So it will consist of two parts - syntax and lexicon. Syntax is the rules, lexicon is the words. This type of grammar is descriptive, rather than prescriptive - it tells you how the language works, rather than seeking to tell you how you should use it. English syntax has plenty of rules - as a couple of examples, adjectives precede the noun that they qualify (in French they mostly follow the noun); basic sentence structure is noun-phrase followed by verb-phrase ('Bit the man the dog' would be verb-phrase followed by noun-phrase, as an example of a different structure). As native speakers, we don't think of these things as grammar, simply because we know them instinctively - they're just how we speak and write (and there are, of course, different grammars for spoken and written language). But they are essential parts of English grammar. In English (and this applies to many of the different versions of our language), grammar is often seen in a different way - hence the idea of how things 'should' be said or written. There are many reasons for this, and I haven't the slightest inclination to go into them here (for anyone who's interested, David Crystal's excellent book "The Stories of English" is a great read). However, it remains the case that much of what we think of as grammar is actually style - examples such as the that/which distinction in the test show this very clearly. Would you fail to understand a sentence where 'which' was used rather than 'that'? I doubt it. Would you struggle with a sentence like 'Bit the man the dog'? Not now I've typed it twice you won't, but you probably would if you heard it. To me, the phrase 'I highly doubt it' sounds wrong, because I wouldn't qualify a doubt with the adjective 'high' - I'd have a serious doubt but not a high doubt, so I'd seriously doubt something. But I couldn't possibly say that the construction itself is wrong; I can only say that I don't like it, which is a very different thing. If you try to impose rules according to how you think a language should be, then you end up in the world of the Academie Francaise, and that's really not a good place to be. as a final nod to both ee cummings and hamilton saint the punctuation and capitalisation mentioned are undoubtedly useful how would you know where a sentence starts and ends without them however this is also a convention of written and not spoken language in the former we use written marks in the latter we use intonation and pauses and yes I do realise that this last paragraph reads just like something written by barry sanchez thus proving the value of punctuation if nothing else

Got the same - as a linguist by education, I'd query this particular "technically incorrect" statement. Language changes (unless it's a dead language) and what was one regarded as incorrect may now be common parlance - I'd say that the construction "bored of" comes into that category. And, as the Bear comments, hardly anybody actually uses "whom" any more. Give it another generation or two and "whom" will be an archaism in the same way that "thou" is in most English dialects. I also think that there's a difference in the way that "that" and "which" are treated in British and US English; in spite of its spelling, this test is clearly US in origin, as the word "math" indicates.

I know just how you feel. One of the first letters I ever wrote to the Echo was in 1976, when I broke the news that Mick Channon was reluctantly considering a move away from Saints, as he felt that being in the Second Division was hampering his England career. Naturally, I was vilified and shouted down by the Echo letters page superstars, who pointed out that Mick was still doing the windmill-arm goal celebration and had been seen smiling on more than one occasion. I was proved right when he left for Manchester City in the summer of 1977 (everything moved a lot more slowly in those days as there was no internet). I wrote another letter to the Echo, enclosing clippings of my previous one plus some of the angry responses it had elicited. They didn't publish it though; some people find it very hard to deal with facts that go against what they'd like to believe.

In fairness, Mark Dennis' disciplinary record improved considerably after he joined us. He'd always seemed like a sending-off waiting to happen (I remember seeing him and Bally sent off together when we played at Birmingham one season and Dennis was in the Brum team). With us, though, he was just a booking waiting to happen.

It would be rather splendid. I like the comment in that article that applications for the job are "believed to stand at more than 100". Not quite sure in what quarters that's believed, still less that there might be more than 100 serious applications.

Peter Shilton Mark Wright Mick Channon

I'm pretty sure we have PG Wodehouse to thank for 'gruntled'.

Looks like he's been writing their official statements, anyway.

It was the chairman, Champagne Iain, who stomped out early, whereas the Twitter comments from Hall (or whoever) mentioned the CEO being there to the (very) bitter end. Neat little smokescreen there to avoid answering the question!

How does saying that you couldn't believe some of our fans would rather we finished 17th and won a cup equate with wanting the silverware then?

From this: to this: and all on the same thread. Magnificent, even by your standards.

Very useful advice - I'd heard that Bosch/Worcester aren't what they once were. Looking at Heatline's web site, they only seem to do a combi boiler, and I'll need a regular on eas the house has a cylinder and cold water tank. Any recommendations other than Vaillant, or am I best off just going with one of those?